I've been tagged to do this challenge by @slutshamethesquirrels , so this piece is naturally inspired by her entry (GO CHECK SHAMESY NOW!)
I think I got a bit carried away tho lol, that's what 6h worth of travel and no internet does to someone bored on the notes app I guess lol
Moreover, I don't know many people so like, do it if you want?
@alt--er--love you’ve now been tagged pookie (edit)
You catch sight of her in the distance, rushing towards you, her headphones barely stuffed into that overly-decorated backpack. Every step echoes with the jingle of a dozen keychains and pins, announcing her presence like a warning bell. She's definitely more fidgety than usual, and her dark circles seem darker– no doubt the aftereffects of another late night. You've heard all about her thesis and her sworn vendetta against the university's computers. You can practically hear her voice: “I swear, the university servers are run on potatoes. My old PC is a supercomputer by comparison!”
Typical engineering student– powered by coffee and, occasionally, spite. She'd probably laugh if you teased her about the stress, eyes lighting up in that way they do when she's preparing to fire back, “Shear, tensile, or fatigue?”
She reaches you, breathless, her all-black outfit blending with the gloomy weather. Today, she's bundled up in that enormous faux-fur coat. The only speck of colour you see on her is actually from her hair, messy red-dyed streaks and racoon tails she dyed herself on impulse.
“I swear I left the house on time! Public transport fucked me again!” She says with a grin that flashes a glimpse of her sharp canines. As she speaks, her fingers find their usual targets– first picking absentmindedly at the skin around her nails, then moving to fidget with the ring she always wears. It's a telltale sign: disrupted routines make her restless, you know. That's when you notice her nails, usually painted in her signature metallic cherry, are a chipped pink pearl instead. It's rare to see her change colours, and given the already peeling polish, you figure she was either too busy to apply the top coat– or too stressed to care.
You shrug, pulling your bag off the canteen seat you saved, waving her worry away. It's lucky to even have a spot here with the recent swarm of first-years flooding the place, and you can already tell she's relieved.
She drops into the seat, immediately digging into her bag for her Tupperware, and just the scent alone– sweet, buttery, familiar– makes you salivate. You're in luck, she made her famous scones this time. You don't even get the chance to thank her before she shoves one into your hands, insisting you take it without a second thought.
As she settles into the seat, her tension seems to ease slightly. She sighs, taking in the lively chaos of the canteen around you. You notice her shoulders relax as she tucks a few red-streaked strands behind her ear, where her earrings –a mix of hoops, charms, and mismatched studs– dangle with every slight movement. She glances around, her big glasses framing bright blue-grey eyes that pop against her heavy eyeliner, giving her gaze an intense, almost electric focus.
“God, I needed a break,” she mutters, more to herself than to you, but then she turns back, studying you with that familiar glint in her eye. She takes a slow, deliberate bite of her scone, a hum of satisfaction slipping out, before raising an eyebrow at you. “So,” she begins, leaning in like she's about to reveal a big secret, “you've gotta tell me– have the scones been perfected?”
“If this is another recipe experiment, you know I'm not the only one who wants to be a test subject,” you laugh, reaching for another one. "But yes, they're even better than last time."
“Test subject? Please,” she scoffs playfully, flashing her signature toothy grin. “I prefer the term ‘lab rats'– though yes, you and the others are all my little testers.” She gives a dramatic roll of her eyes, a mock sigh of pity. “The things you all endure for the sake of science.”
You can't help but grin too, taking a bite of the scone while she watches you, her expression one of amused concentration. She may not say it, she isn't one to pour out affection in words, but you've learned to read between the lines of her cooking. This is her way of showing that she considers you a friend– testing her creations on you, perfecting each recipe like it's a lab experiment and you're her chosen subject.
“Well, I'd say your lab work's paying off,” you tell her, as the buttery, flaky pastry melts in your mouth. “Though maybe you should think about ditching chemical engineering and open a bakery after your thesis instead.”
Her laugh is genuine, and she leans back, clearly satisfied. “That's actually my retirement plan. I'll open a bakery, and always make extra for you.”
I have to be the good daughter, the good student, and I don't know if I am developing my own identity to the point that I also don't see myself motivated enough to meet people's expectations. I can't help but hate myself rn. 😮💨
You have such a beautiful imagination! I love your description of the Winter Court especially. How do you come up with such original, creative descriptions and stories? Or does it just come naturally? (I love fantasy and writing, but I don’t have the inagination to be as good as you:/)
Why thank you, child! You are very kind indeed. But you know…I was not always as good as I am now. Would you believe that when I very first started out writing, at a very young age, my biggest problem was that I could never think of anything to write? My dearest mother tried to fix the problem by buying a book of prompts to give me ideas. I hated it. In my opinion, both then and now, the prompts were all boring and not at all what I wanted to write about. However, they did help. Despite my young and rage filled self…I got better as I wrote, even about things I didn’t want to write about.I was also, from age 3 and upwards, an avid reader. A vast love of fantasy filled my veins as I read everything I could catch hold of. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Last Unicorn, Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Phantom Tollbooth, The 13 ½ lives of Captain Bluebear, and a thousand more. I was not too keen on other genres, though later in life I would grow a great love for various forms of Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, Science Fiction, and even Academic Writing. But despite my inclination towards Fantasy, I read everything.Do you have any idea what that can do to the mind of a child? Filling up their heads with the pages of trillions of books? Expanding their mind to new heights from which it can never entirely descend from? It is like a door opening in a place that has not had fresh air in a very long time, and the rushing winds of life come crashing in, filling up every available space. Suddenly it becomes easier to breathe, easier to live, easier to grow.It is a journey of years, with constant practice, that brought me here. I explored interesting places and forced myself to talk to new people and make friends. There were books to read, events to experience. I watched television shows and researched religions, I read through scientific essays about subjects which would never have any effect on my own life. All of this I did because I enjoyed it, not because I had some goal in mind. But all of it helped me to grow my imagination. With constant practice my writing skills grew as well. I challenged myself to research archaic forms or new styles and I tried to copy the style with my own ideas. I even created a few of my own forms of writing by building off of other forms I’d tried. This little blog is my attempt to further develop my skills by challenging myself to work within a set limitation of subject. You say that my writing is original and creative. And that you don’t have the imagination to be as good as me. Well, I didn’t pop out of the ground with my skills and my imagination the way they are now. I had to become that way through living life, through understanding myself, and through putting constant effort into practicing my skills.What I am trying to say, Child, in my very roundabout way…is that I firmly believe that you too have the ability to write of wondrous things in equally wondrous ways. It takes time, of course, and immense effort. The imagination, like the skill of writing, is another muscle which you must strengthen by using it and challenging it. But it is not impossible.You say you love writing, so let me put it this way. Imagine for one moment that you are both writer and story. You cannot just sit back and let the world write you. It will do it wrong, somehow. So you have to take up the pen and write yourself, the way that you want to be. I believe in you.
So, I've been looking over some of my old art, with the intention of redrawing something as a 'then-and-now' kind of comparison, so that I can pretend like I've gotten better. And I noticed a weird trend.
First, I should start by saying I have noticed certain trends in what I like in my character designs. For example, I like pretty men and I like scars and injuries. They just kind of show up a lot in my character design and when I build backstories for characters. There are just some design elements that tend to get repeated because I like them and like adding them to things.
Anyway, I was looking over a bunch of the pre-prep work I'd done for an old comic idea, and I noticed something when looking at the character reference sheet for the main antagonist. Specifically, she looked like me. Now to be fair, my style is fairly generic so a lot of the fine details don't transfer over (I have a tiny square head with a hawks-beak nose, and I'm pretty sure I've never drawn anyone with that), so a lot of people will look at any character I draw with brown hair, glasses and grey eyes and say 'is that you?', so the resemblence is broad. But it's still there. Of the three female characters who got reference sheets drawn up, one has my eye shape, glasses the same shape as mine were, and her hair cut the way mine was (She's not in colour, but I'm fairly sure her hair was a dark dirty blonde, which mine also was at the time). And she was the main villain of the story.
Which got me thinking about the characters I'd created that were explicitly based off of myself.
The first major project where I actually got my act together and wrote some stuff was a kind of alternate Digimon setting. A team of characters and Digimon I'd created going through the digital world, having adventures and trying to stop the breakdown or corruption of the world, all the usual tropes. Except the villain was... well, me. The antagonist of the story, that the characters were specifically up against, was me. There was some planned plot twist where I was playing with the more troubling ideas behind a "digi-destiny" (Or any kind of destiny in general, which I found existentially uncomfortable even when I was 13/ 14), but the main antagonist of the series was still meant to be me.
Later, I created a character that was explicitly a riff on the 'me' I'd constructed in my head to interact with the characters in the books I was reading. Those self-insert fantasies we all build for ourselves but don't usually write down or share with anyone, where we get involved in our own soap-opera plots with the cannon. The only thing she ended up really having in common with me was that we both had short (at the time) brown hair - she had a prettier and more heart-shaped face, large dark/black eyes that didn't need glasses, she actually had lips, and she had larger breasts than me (Because of course in the fantasies I was more attractive, but I didn't really have the best grasp on what makes a woman more desireable to boys beyond "well, I guess they like boobs, right? That seems like a thing"). Oh, and she was a witch, because I was a teenager and Witches and Wicca in general were a source of endless facination. So I had this character, who was made up of all the scraps of fake-me's that I decided to throw together to see what came out the other end, and she still looked pretty plain compared to other characters, but whatever. I needed to do something with her now. So I made her a rival for the character I wrote about and played around with most. I built her from all the features I only dared to give myself in my head, and made her an annoyance in someone else's story.
This was my best case self construction.
I've created other versions of myself, of course. The icon for this tumblr is a creature I use to represent myself, which has gone through several itterations. But those characters don't get integrated into stories - they exist entirely to represent me, free of any context beyond the real world. I've explicitly created two characters based off of myself, and apparently subconciously created a third, and they're all antagonists in someone else's story. Has anyone else done this?
I don't know what that says about me or my perceived role in writing about them, but it feels like it has some kind of ontological weight.
